Born June 18, 1889, in
Brooklyn,
New York, Sanxay attended Miss Whitcombe's and other schools for young ladies before marrying British diplomat George E. Holding in 1913. The couple had two daughters, Skeffington (1917-2009) and the enamelist and novelist Antonia Holding Schwed (1919-2006), and traveled widely in
South America and the
Caribbean before living in
Bermuda for a number of years, where Mr. Holding was a government official. After Mr. Holding's retirement, the couple lived in the
Bronx section of
New York City, where Elisabeth Sanxay Holding died on February 7, 1955. Elisabeth Sanxay Holding wrote romantic novels during the 1920s, but, after the stock market crash in 1929, she turned to the more lucrative genre of the detective novel. From 1929 through 1954, she wrote eighteen detective novels, which sold well and earned her praise for her style and character development. Her series character for these novels was Lieutenant Levy. Holding also authored many short stories. Her novel
The Blank Wall (1947) was popular enough to inspire the film adaptation
The Reckless Moment in 1949. It was adapted again into the 2001
The Deep End. It was republished by
Persephone Books in 2003 and again in 2009. It appeared in 2015 as part of the
Library of America's omnibus
Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s. A number of Holding's crime novels have been more recently reprinted by Stark House Press and other publishers and made available to new readers. ==Critical reputation==